Winding Down XMPP, for Now

Without going into a full blown post about XMPP, our take is that it’s a good model / protocol, with too many scattered implementations which is leaving it in the “immature” bucket. Apache wound up setting the HTTP standard, and an XMPP server equivalent hasn’t taken hold in the marketplace.

From Gnip’s perspective, XMPP is causing us pain and eating cycles. More than half of all customer service requests are about XMPP and in many cases, the receiving party isn’t standing up their own server. They’re running off of Google or Jabber.org and there’s not much we can do when they get throttled. As a result, we’ve decided that we should eliminate XMPP (both in/out bound) as soon as possible. Outbound will be shut off with our next code push on Wednesday; we’ll cut inbound when Twitter finds another way to push to us.

For the foreseeable future, our world revolves around increasing utility by adding to the breadth of publishers in our system. Features / functionality that support that goal are, with few exceptions, our only priority and XMPP support isn’t in that mix. Expect our first releases of hosted polling and usage statistics later this month. We’ll reevaluate XMPP support when either a) we have cycles or b) a significant number of partners request it.